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The New Internet

(tailscale.com)
517 points ingve | 4 comments | 26 Jul 24 18:29 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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k_bx ◴[27 Jul 24 07:17 UTC] No.41084970[source]▶
I'm one of the people who actually use Tailscale for production systems where there are servers physically close to me, or at some other controlled locations, and then there are hundreds of users hundreds kilometers away, all working via Tailscale.

I should say two things. Tailscale is amazing and I love it. The system could not exist without it, or I'd have to have at least ten more people in my team to manage all this 24/7. It's working, and it's good enough.

That being said, you do need to lower your expectations: it's not as good as "the internet". The latency spikes periodically, the connection drops sometimes, the MagicDNS just magically stops working or interferes with the system. Since we have many users, we've encountered every possible problem one can encounter, and then there's still something new you'll see tomorrow.

In any case, we believe in Tailscale and its vision, it's a categorically new approach that simultaneously gives you the control on hardware, reduces the cost, and improves the security. Our first big production server was a 4-core Linux Laptop!

We love Tailscale and we wish the product prosperous life and development. Thank you TEAM TAILSCALE!

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1. aquariusDue ◴[27 Jul 24 11:16 UTC] No.41085800[source]▶
Would you mind going into more detail about the 4-core Linux Laptop as a production server via Tailscale, please? I too use Tailscale and love it for self-hosting internal stuff but I never thought about using it for public facing production stuff. Now I'm really curious to hear more about your setup (if you're willing to share of course).
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2. phantompeace ◴[27 Jul 24 14:15 UTC] No.41086748[source]▶
Not the person you’ve asked but I regularly use it for backends for projects. Connect your database machine to your Tailscale network and have your code talk over the Tailscale IP to connect to it. I’ve served multiple Flask frontends that have talked to backends this way - works great! I use various cloud VMs to host the frontend, and they all talk to an Optiplex Micro box under my desk for their backends.
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3. k_bx ◴[27 Jul 24 16:13 UTC] No.41087467[source]▶
It's very simple. We needed to begin somewhere, and until we've had at least 10-20 active users which load our database with their analytics queries, we wouldn't require a lot in terms of compute power and speed. However, we do have electricity stability problems sometimes (and internet outage), so something which has its own battery and ability to switch to a backup wifi/lte was a great choice as a start.

So that laptop was a "free server" we've had. It's now replaced by a much beefier miniPC.

4. k_bx ◴[27 Jul 24 16:15 UTC] No.41087478[source]▶
This, plus you get free domain name with HTTPS cert working.